We need you

As we discovered at our summer conference on Being Human: Christian Perspectives on the Human Person, the Portsmouth Institute is one of the few voices articulating an authentic Catholic perspective on first principles, those truths which we take to be foundational to the human experience.

Our summer conference was a fantastic success. We heard some of the sharpest minds in the Catholic world today—scholars and evangelizers like Ryan Anderson, Peter Kreeft, Sr. Bethany Madonna and John F. Crosby—articulate what it means to be human from the perspectives of education, politics, religious life, economics, theology, and more.

And over the past year, the Portsmouth Institute has done more than ever to set our culture on a steady course rooted in Christian faith and wisdom. Through our events and publications, thousands of students, teachers, and lifelong learners have encountered the richness of Catholic thought. But as you and I both know, we need to do a lot more if we want to make a significant effect on our culture. These programs in particular need your support:

• Student seminars offer young people an encounter with the enduring truth, beauty, and goodness of the Catholic faith;
• Conferences and year-round lectures provide authentic Catholic catechesis to parents and grandparents who do the important work of raising Christian families in a secular age;
• Conversatiodistributes conference presentations and exclusive content to thousands of people who are desperate for a richer understanding of what it means to be human;
• And through intensive academic colloquia we can share the richness of the Catholic intellectual tradition with teachers, scholars, and influencers who help shape culture in the classroom, on social media, and in leading journals and opinion pages

Here’s the thing: all of this important work requires significant financial resources.

The “principalities and powers” working against Christian culture are powerful and growing. Organizations with enormous amounts of resources, such as the Human Rights Campaign, are actively working to redefine what it means to be human. And as Ryan Anderson told us at our summer conference: they are succeeding.

This week is especially important for us as we get ready to close out our fiscal year. I’ll follow up again later this week to continue updating you on the work the Portsmouth Institute is accomplishing and ways you can get involved.